Inventory Management Software: Buying Advice, Tips, and News

Inventory management is more than simply knowing what's left in the warehouse. Today these systems track the warehouse, a product's shelf life, and even your customers' experience. We test top players to help you choose.

AccountMate is a solid entry in small to midsize business (SMB) financials, inventory management, and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Though it's missing some sophisticated features that other products have, it's still very usable and configurable.

Sage 300 is a mid-range accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solution that is easy to use. But its functionality and expansion modules are limited, and it lags slightly behind the competition in drill-down and customization features.

Acumatica's intuitive design, enterprise scalability, and flexible pricing model help make Acumatica an excellent choice for enterprise resource planning, general ledger accounting, and inventory management.

Oracle NetSuite OneWorld is written for the cloud, focusing on ease of use and modularity. It is a solid financials platform that can be easily expanded to meet other business needs simply by buying additional functionality through the cloud.

While Open Systems Traverse is one of the oldest players in the space, it actually shows its age in areas like UI design. Still it's a solidly capable mid-tier financial platform that's well worth a look.

Zoho Inventory has a nice price and is tightly integrated with the rest of Zoho's software portfolio. But its standalone focus can make it difficult to integrate into vertical businesses dependent on other software tools.

Cougar Mountain Denali Summit is aimed squarely at midsized businesses and it sports a wide variety of expansion modules. Its design can be a little lackluster in places, but for most businesses it provides a serviceable financial platform.

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise is a good next step for companies that have gotten to large for Intuit's more small business-focused cloud-based versions. However, there are some scalability and back-end integration issues you'll want to consider before making the move.

Syspro is a strong contender for the enterprise resource planning (ERP) needs of small, midsize, and large businesses. The system is extremely flexible, comprehensive, and easy to use, offering a plethora of reports and easily scaling from one to several hundred users.

SAP Business One Professional has good features and flexibility overall, but is designed as an "old school" enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. It may be too complex for many users especially small to midsize businesses (SMBs).